I turned 50 in 2007, so I'm practicing curmudgeon-like behavior by stressing, "whatever it is, I'm agin' it!" Call me anarcho-syndicalist or progressive, except I think most anarchists and progressives are as annoying as neocons. I like to point folks to way-outside-the-mainstream literature and music, while grumbling about everything else.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

I hate to diss the Democratic urban activists who tend to think that "populism" is a cute word to toss around, but the posts below on Lou Dobbs et. al. should make clear that I equate populism with Juan Peron, if not with the German Nazi Party. It's nice to see that Middle East Report, a fairly lefty quarterly covering the Middle East, thinks so too. Their new Winter issue is a special on Iran that is worth reading cover to cover, particularly Kaveh Ehsani's piece on the inside nature of the Iranian regime. Some U.S. activists think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a pretty cool guy because he hates the U.S. and Israel, and many Iranians treat him as a rock star. He's a populist, dictatorial snake. I still am reserving a small portion of hope for Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, since many of his domestic policies are cool, but his international grandstanding is getting tiresome, and has "populist" written all over it. Populism is not cool. It leads to "Sieg Heils" when you least expect it.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Bob Kearns is the kind of guy the ACLU was made for. A resident of his neighborhood in Pagosa Springs, Colo. (down near Durango) tried to hang a peace-sign wreath. Kearns, the NA President, called it disrespectful and a possible Satanic symbol. When his architectural control commission disagreed with him, he fired all five members. The fact that resident Lisa Jensen is not backing down means that she'll probably win this one, but this should serve to remind us that mandatory neighborhood associations are, with rare exceptions, dictatorial fiefdoms that have no place in a democracy.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Disclaimer: My folks never banned toy guns from the house, and I've never been adamant about gun control, though I always thought an obsession with guns was creepy in the extreme. Since the post-Thanksgiving advertising season began, the onslaught of ads for PS3, Xbox, and Wii has been narrowly focused on the first-person shooter game. Silly me, I thought that advanced graphics might be useful for three-dimensional virtual worlds (unrelated to blasting everything to kingdom come) and to the next level of John Madden sports spectacular. Instead, we get killing people/robots/animals with weapons of every stripe. Friends tell me Sony et al are simply responding to the college-age male demographic. I say the problem is that too many gamers are morons. Don't give me that "eye-hand dexterity" shit. Shooter experts are being groomed as cannon fodder by the Defense Department. Other than that, the shooter game carries no redeeming social value except proving the idiocy of the player, and showing how many gaming dummies are lackeys for a military-fascist state.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

At least Jose Varela gave us some scary comic relief on Buy Nothing Day, when he stormed into the Miami Herald and declared himself to be the new publisher. The relationship between the Miami Herald and its sister Spanish-language pub, El Nuevo Herald, has been tangled up in the arcane and violent politics between different groups of anti-Castro Cubans. The English-language paper broke a story showing that several reporters at the Spanish-language edition had received U.S. government money for writing anti-Castro stories. At any other paper in the country, that would have been cause for shutting Nuevo Herald down and pushing for a Pulitzer for the ones that revealed the government ties. Not in Miami. In the first weeks following the story, the publisher backed the editors that were under the pay of the U.S. government, and forced out reformers. But on Friday, Varela's rambling comments suggested the winds were blowing in a new direction, with moderating reforms at work at both the English and Spanish Herald editions. This doesn't sit well with the fifth of the Miami population that works for or actively supports either the CIA or various violent anti-Castro groups.

My own exasperation with this story stems from the new image that the Miami area, particularly South Beach, retains among young rich playtime celebrities who like to purchase bazillion-dollar condos. Of course hip-hop artists and sports stars never pay attention to local politics. And of course, with an urban area that is heavily Hispanic and close to Cuba, you have to expect passionate politics of this sort. But Miami has been out of bounds for at least 20 or 30 years. Its police have developed a reputation for routinely beating anyone vaguely "leftist," most recently in the shocking actions Police Chief John Timoney took at the Nov. 2003 Free Trade of the Americas Act protests in downtown Miami. The police are never taken to task for this, because several successive mayors and city councils of Miami support the violent fascism they learned at the feet of the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans.

I was asked to speak at a liberal-funders conference in Miami in late 2004, and I asked several organizers why they didn't boycott a town like this. Most seemed blissfully unaware of the kind of city Miami was (not surprising, giving funding institutions' general unfamilarity with reality, but that's another story). Maybe the fight between the two Heralds and the wacky actions of Jose Varela will lead to some much needed fresh air and public debate in a very smarmy and repressive city. But until that time, the rest of the country ought to boycott the entire Miami metro area, and let local civic leaders know why!

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

It's funny, I've despised Lou Dobbs more and more lately, yet his latest column sounds like any that a globalization protester might have made to Davos or the G-8. Read it, you can see he's got some points, and yet.... and yet.... Dobbs bugs me for the same reason that great populists from Juan Peron to Father Charles Coughlin to Patrick Buchanan (maybe to Hugo Chavez) have always bugged me. The demagoguery, the hyper-nationalism, the "it's all about me" syndrome lurks just below the surface. The great thing about the 1999 WTO protesters in Seattle was that there were few media stars, few larger-than-life personalities. But populists always want to tell you that "I saved you from those rapacious owners of capital!" (hmm, sounds kinda neo-Nazi here), and often they want to tell you how great the nation is and how we have to keep the borders pure, which is about where Lou Dobbs is at. Yes, I like his pre-Thanksgiving column, but no, I do not think that anyone who calls themselves a progressive should say they like Lou Dobbs.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

I'm never hesitant to give the president a smidgeon of credit when he gets something right, since those instances are so few and far between. Several weeks ago, the State Department with backing of DOD and CIA, warned that Hezbollah would try to destabilize Lebanon and bring it back to the Syria-dominated days before March 2005. Critics said the White House was just prejudiced against Hezbollah moving from military to political influence. Well, in the last week, Hezbollah has deliberately brought down the multi-party "confessional" government, and today, Pierre Gemayel was assassinated. I'm sorry, there's no way a good Middle East progressive can rationalize Hezbollah-Syria-Iran behavior, or blame this one on the CIA. I'm sure I won't agree with Bush's response, but at least he had the basic outline right of what might happen in Lebanon.

As more than 120 people gathered at the gate of Fort Huachuca today to protest military intelligence training there that fosters torture, two Roman Catholic priests were arrested when they tried to enter the base, located in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Franciscan Fr. Louie Vitale and Jesuit Fr. Steve Kelly intended to speak with enlisted personnel and deliver a letter to Major General Barbara Fast, commander at the post, denouncing torture and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.Major General Fast is the highest ranking intelligence officer tied to the torture at Abu Ghraib torture, yet she has never been punished. Two soldiers with ties to Fort Huachuca are among 28 implicated earlier this year in the beating deaths of two prisoners in Afghanistan in 2002.Today¹s demonstration took place in conjunction with the annual vigil at Fort Benning, Georgia, where over 20,000 people vigiled today and at least 14 were arrested as they called for closing the infamous School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). Dozens of Latin American military leaders who trained at the ³School of Assassins² have since been convicted of torture, murder, and other heinous crimes in their own countries.Frs. Vitale and Kelly walked into the base but were stopped as they approached the gatehouse. An officer from the base offered to deliver their letter to the Commander, but the priests persisted, because they also intended to speak with the service men and women receiving interrogation training at Fort Huachuca. When they were not allowed to pass, the two men knelt in prayer and were arrested. They both received a federal citation for trespass and were released without conditions, and told they should be contacted within 45 days with a court date.Fr. Louie Vitale is a member of Pace e Bene, whose mission is ³to develop the spirituality and practice of active nonviolence as a way of living and being and as a process for cultural transformation.² Fr. Vitale is also a co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience, a faith-based organization that has opposed nuclear weapons testing for a quarter of a century. Fr. Vitale recently served six months in jail following his arrest at the Ft. Benning vigil in November, 2005, and was ejected from congressional hearings in September after speaking out against the Military Commissions Act.Fr. Steve Kelly is a member of the Redwood City Catholic Worker community and has served time in federal prison for the nonviolent direct disarmament of nuclear weapon delivery systems. In December, 2005, Kelly served as chaplain for Witness to Torture, a delegation of over two dozen U.S. anti-torture activists who defied the U.S. embargo of Cuba with a peaceful march through that nation to the gates of the Guantanamo Bay navel base and prison camp.The text of the letter delivered to the base commander follows this news release.- 30 -

To: Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast -

We are here today as concerned U.S. people, veterans and clergy, to speak with enlisted personnel about the illegality and immorality of torture according to international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions.

We condemn torture as a dehumanization of both prisoners and interrogators, resulting in humiliation, disability and even death. In addition to the hundreds of detainees who have died, we are also concerned about U.S. military personnel. Alyssa Peterson committed suicide after participating in the torture of Iraqi prisoners. Lynndie England and others have been imprisoned for their illegal activities.

We are here today at Ft. Huachuca in solidarity with tens of thousands of people at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Ft. Benning, Georgia (formerly known as the School of the Americas) to say that the training of torturers must immediately stop. Nothing justifies the inhumane treatment of our fellow brothers and sisters.

Torture by U.S. military personnel has reached alarming proportions and has horrified people around the world. We are convinced that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is unconstitutional. We totally reject its conclusions. Torture is a useless and unreliable tool that leads to an accepted practice of terrorization and the rationalization of wrongdoing.

We are here today to repent and clearly state that because of our sense of moral and human decency we condemn torture.

Last week, I took Richard Goldstein's side of slamming the deification of Dylan, now it's time to repeat the exercise with the Beatles. Giles Martin wants to produce a Beatles mashup, and Bob Spitz, author of "The Beatles: The Biography" doesn't like it. Cry me a freakin' river! Icons only exist for vandals to paint fake moustaches on. While it will be hard for Martin to beat the Danger Mouse "Gray Album" mash-up of Beatles and Jay-Z, it would be just as much fun to hear a Beatles remix of their own tunes, as to read a cut-and-paste mash of Joyce or Vonnegut or Pynchon. Hey, check out Pere Ubu's sideways revamp of their October 2006 album, 'Why I Hate Women," titled "Why I Remix Women," and tell me Giles Martin isn't doing the right thing. Spitz and friends, stop putting culture heroes on pedestals, it does not flatter their legacy.

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times has weighed in heavily on the negative side for the new Thomas Pynchon, writing in "A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon" that the new novel is like an undergrad's take on Pynchon, written on quaaludes. Gravity's Rainbow got plenty of bad reviews by lesser mortals who just didn't "get it", but it's pretty obvious that Kakutani gets the evolution of Pynchon all too well, and doesn't like it. What Kakutani would like to see is the goofy humanism of the characters in Mason and Dixon, alongside the conspiratorial terror of the earlier novels. The review suggests that what we get instead are Potemkin-village versions of conspiracies in the years of the Ludlow strikes in Colorado, and the events surrounding the Spanish-American War and lead-up to WWI.

I'll be busy through December finishing Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, with its massive goofy conspiracy theories of the Louis XIV era, so I won't be getting to Pynchon until early 2007. No matter how much I love and revere the guy, I worry that Kakutani may be on to something.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Alberto Gonzales has often shown himself to be a scarier attorney general than John Ashcroft. Where Ashcroft was severe and authoritarian without putting much thought into his mighty hammer for the Bush administration, Gonzales has tried to provide a legal justification for his beliefs. On Nov. 18, Gonzales spoke to 400 cadets at the Air Force Academy and chided the "myths" behind criticism of warrantless surveillance and the holding of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo. The only problem is that the so-called myths Gonzales criticizes represent toe core principles promoted by the founders of the Constitution.

On the electronic surveillance front, there is nothing in the Constitution that assumes or allows global electronic networks of the National Security Agency to operate. Even if we assume a lenient stance at Echelon's existence, the post-1975 Congress created the conditions under which NSA operated with its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation. Following 9/11, George Bush could have broadened FISA legislation by asking Congress to broaden FISA. Instead, he simply bypassed FISA. This runs counter to everything the Constitution's authors assumed about the breakdown of authority across legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

Similarly, there are two realms in which enemy-combatant preventive detention goes against Constitutional structures. First, the very nature of a combatant outside Geneva POW constraints goes against U.S. precedent and international law. Second, the existence of prisons external to Guantanamo, where prisoners can be mistreated by the CIA separate from the lenient Guantanamo constraints, makes a mockery of treatment at Guantanamo. For those that would put all the blame for the latter on Cheney, the CIA now has admitted that the CIA "rendition" prisons were established by executive order from Bush, with advice from Gonzales.

A good amount of the blame for such nonsense, of course, can be placed on the 109th Congress, which conducted the fewest number of oversight hearings of any Congress in the last century, and virtually begged Bush to extend executive authority to the detriment of legislative and judicial. But the intellectual cover used by the White House has come from Gonzales, and the fact that the attorney general is promoting his "myths" to Air Force cadets, while calling legitimate defense of Constitutional law a new form of myth, shows the depths of depravity to which this administration has sunk.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Everyone familiar with Guy DeBord's Society of the Spectacle and its prediction of the completely mediated, ad-driven society? For guidance on the last ten years of Spectacular living, check out back issues of Adbusters magazine, which will give you the snooty Vancouver college-grad outlook on totally-mediated culture. If you want the real thing, go to your supermarket and check out the new Lucky magazine, the magazine for and about shopping. What is the difference between this magazine and a catalog, you may ask? Why don't folks recognize it's wall to wall advertising of various types? Don't ask me, but the folks reviewing at Amazon and elsewhere seem to love it. The demise into superficiality, shopping, and celebrity culture seemed to begin when the primary readers for National Enquirer and Star were no longer Kansas matrons, but 20-something women in NYC. Now they have Lucky magazine to enhance their materialist entertainment. Whoopee.

Anni Rainbow is the brave woman who has worked with Lindis Percy on the Campaign for Accountability of American Bases, and particularly on the large NSA intelligence base at Menwith Hill, UK. The Independent did a nice piece today on the death of her son in Iraq.

Sanneh is a bit harsh in the way that friends who sympathize with an argument but think the argument is overblown can always be harsh. There are holes in both sides of this music debate, but I think Sanneh's conclusion speaks volumes at the end of this essay when he says that "It's nice to imagine we're all in this together. But we ain't." Remember Lou Reed's scathing critique of Jesse Jackson and his "quilt" theory? I disagreed with Reed, as he thought Jackson was too anti-Semitic and Reed himself was too accepting of Israel's policy, but I agreed with his observation that there may never be a quilt big enough to cover what once was called The Movement. And in fact, there was never a form of rock and roll that was going to lead the revolution. Despite what The Who, Springsteen, Abbie Hoffman, and Don McLean said, rock and roll was never going to save anyone's mortal soul.

Point for Sanneh: The so-called unity of music was largely a product of clever advertising during the 1960s, and a temporary media fascination with youth culture during that same period. Yes, AM radio programming in the 1960s provided temporary unity of genres, and FM underground programming a few years later presented an illusion of an underground. Yes, there was a lot more politics in million-seller music of the past, and it sure felt good to hear Grace Slick say, "Up against the wall motherfucker," but that particular revolution was always brought to you by RCA.

Point for Shapter/Rasmussen: The filmmakers recognize the star-making machinery has been broken for decades, and Sanneh points out that even its executives are willing to concede that now. But the same is true for mainstream media - the owners of newspapers and TV news concede they've been stenographers to power for over 20 years, yet they keep sucking up to the big corporate and government teats. Music industry developers knew they were touting talentless boy-girl bubble bands and flat hip-hop and R&B acts for many years, even as they were slicing out the hearts of good A&R people pursuing real talent. But as long as the money came in, they weren't willing to rock a boat that was obviously springing leaks everywhere. Sanneh isn't emphasizing how utterly hypocritical it is for former music execs to complain now.

Point for Sanneh: The column says the filmmakers don't identify what genre they support, though there are suggestions that the love for Bonnie Raitt, Little Feat, and obscure blues singers may indicate a wannabe-hippie/world-music love. That does indeed seem to be the Shapter/Rasmussen bias. I have news for them: The best pop music was not necessarily made before 1975. The punk explosion of the late 1970s, the grunge/indie explosion of the 1990s, had just as much validity and talent as any late-60s cornucopia. (Maybe we can all agree that with exceptions like Smiths, Talking Heads, and REM, the 1980s were a pretty empty period.) Maybe it's a shame that a lot of good 1990s bands didn't get the attention they deserved, but sometimes it's better when certain revolutions aren't televised. Besides, if the filmmakers are hippie-jammers, what the hell are they complaining about, they've got more String Cheese Incident and Phish albums than could be listened to in a finite amount of time.

Uncertain Point: Power pop, values, and million-seller hits make for interesting debates, but please don't use Nickelback as an example of someone with all political and cultural hearts in the right place! Shapter and Rasmussen only were wrong in their particular iconic choice. The fact remains that hit-making radio goes through inexplicable trends in tastemaking. No form of power pop could get on a Top 40 station in the late 1990s and very early 2000s. Today, we have Killers and Fallout Boy and The Fray and Panic at the Disco, but we don't have a thousand more deserving indie bands. And it's not due to any band's inherent grace or better politics, there's a random suckup factor at work here.

Point for Sanneh: What in the world is the Shapter/Rasmussen obsession with Bob Dylan, and the queries on Dylan made to fans attending an Ashlee Simpson concert? Didn't the filmmakers read the excellent and highly-deserved slam on Dylan-worshippers by Richard Goldstein in The Nation magazine in May? (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060515/goldstein) Dylan gave the world two years of biting political commentary, five years of surrealist hyper-observations of the culture, and 38 years of uneven, shlocky material. Every decade has given us plenty of good, political, topical folk singers, many of whom have talents nearing Dylan's. (Best one today is David Rovics, http://www.davidrovics.com) The only difference is that revolutionary songwriters in later decades were singing to the committed, while Dylan grabbed a mass audience through good PR.

Uncertain Point: Neither the filmmakers nor Sanneh recognize the value in keeping your music-making away from mass culture as a deliberate strategy. I'm not arguing for willful obscurity, if you happen to find an audience of millions, good for you! But true underground music is healthier in the 21st century than it's ever been, and if you're not aware of it, it's because you may not know about it. Remember, the albums from the psychedelic era that fetch the highest prices on eBay these days are by bands that even the most adamant Haight-Ashbury acidhead wouldn't have heard of. They were released in editions of 200 copies by regional revolutionaries who never scratched the pop culture surface. There are thousands of great musicians and bands in the 21st century who tout their stuff only on MySpace, YouTube, and online mail-order lists, using the Internet to completely bypass the mass culture. Many use an art-curator model to offer hand-painted editions of CDs and vinyl in worldwide editions of 50 or 100. Sanneh mentioned the execs lamenting the kids who don't buy any physical copies of music today, and simply download files from iTunes. Well, let them have their Nelly Furtado or Kanye West in disposable format, since it's disposable music! Meanwhile, the true underground thrives, and doesn't care how healthy Sony Music or Island Records may be at any given moment.

Remember what your friends at indymedia say, "Be the media." Large corporations will never provide a soundtrack for revolution.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Ya gotta admire those Scots, even if they're all drunken souses with the worst eating and smoking habits in the Western world. They're going to blockade the Faslane Trident submarine base for 365 days in a row:

Building on the success of previous mass blockadesof the Trident nuclear base at Faslane, there will be ayear-long continuous peaceful blockade at Faslane inScotland. To make this happen, groups and organisations fromScotland, England and Wales, and beyond are being invitedto come and shut down the base for at least one 48-hourperiod each during the year.

The purpose of Faslane 365 is twofold: to bring peopleto witness and impede the nuclear base where Britain'snuclear weapons are deployed, and enable them to demonstratethe range of serious concerns - from human rights to climatechange - that people in the real world consider to be the vitalchallenges for the 21st century. Running from October 1st 2006for a year, at a time when Tony Blair has put on the politicalagenda the prospect of spending some £40 billion more to keepnuclear weapons in Scotland until at least the year 2055, Faslane365 will draw attention to the dangerous insecurity and wasteof resources inherent in the Trident nuclear system,and will mobilise support for these nuclear mistakes to be disarmed.In preventing nuclear 'business as usual' we also intend to highlightour real, human security needs, which will require a very differentallocation of resources and action.

In order to do this, Faslane 365 is asking a wide rangeof local, national and even international groups from all sectionsof civil society to come to Faslane with at least 100 peoplecommitted to stay and make their visions for a just and peacefulfuture visible for at least one period of 48 hours.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Imagine that - a look back at the scary performance-art-and-19th-century-economic-policy-as-seen-through-the-eyes-of-a-singing-bull that is Caroliner Rainbow(aka Caroliner Rainbow Stewed Angel Skins, Caroliner Rainbow Scrambled Eggs Taken for a Wife, etc.) As the old saying goes, if you've seen Caroliner Rainbow perform, no explanation is necessary. If you haven't seen Caroliner Rainbow, no explanation is possible.

"This is some lost American Baroque, retrieved at rummagesales...Caroliner holds on to an old-fashioned esthetic of sensoryassault, raised to anunusually high pitch of musical sophistication"-Alex Ross, New York Times, April 15, 1993

23 Years of Hernia Milk and Ergot Dreams: A Retrospective of Carolinerand itsHomage to a 19th Century Singing Bull

Echo de Pensees Sound Series in conjunction with The Museum of ViralMemory presents,

Caroliner was formed in San Francisco in 1983 when a ragtag band oftemporally misplaced troubadours ran afoul of an astrally displacedgang of misbehaved minstrels.Initial violence blossomed from the dead bull ghost into corporateconfusion when deep inside a mould induced hallucination theycopyrighted the original songs of a singing bull,Caroliner, who wastragically killed and eaten by its starved owner in the mythic age of1833.Taking ergot-poisoned pills through a Wisconsin death trip, the groupbegan recreating their hallucinatory dream state through hypnoticsound, flamboyant costumes, and glowing props. Two decades later theyare still digging through Caroliner's prodigious aural droppings withday-glominer'

s helmets and home made shovels of calcium-welded bone.The sounds are a heady mix of toxic shock and shocking talk, folkconfusion and percussive dissolution.For Hernia Milk and Ergot Dreams concerned folks have dug through thegroup's checkered past and black-light warehouse to choose the creamof the crop of 23 years of Caroliner props, costumes,instruments,records, books, flyers and assorted other detritus.The show will close on January 13thwith Caroliner's first performancein a year and a half.The set will take place at California College of the Arts' GraduateCenter in San Francisco,with Luz Alibi and Georgio Marauder, Theremin Barney and Ploc Monster.

23 Years of Hernia Milk and Ergot Dreams exposes Caroliner's tragictrail of tears through the American dream and across the world.

PLAySPACE California College of the Arts1111 8th Street (at 16th and Wisconsin)San Francisco, CA 94107Regular gallery hours are Wed., Thurs., andSat. 12-3pm. or by appt.Contact marcella.faustini@gmail.com for more information.

This one is not a joke - Ardeth Platte, Carol Gilbert, and Jackie Hudson were three Plowshares nuns who were arrested at a Colorado missile silo in the fall of 2002. The feds prosecuted them under felony charges, and are demanding full resititution for "damages" done to the silo, though the fence damages being dunned were caused by the APC who went barrelling in to arrest the nonviolent protesters. Here's an idea for donations and restitutions the sisters came up with in mid-November. It's worth your attention:

OPEN LETTER from SACRED EARTH AND SPACE PLOWSHARES II, 2002

Dear friends,

We need your help!Please join us in our response to the judge, prosecutor, and probation officers to complete our restitution issue.

Through prayer, discernment and an inspired action, we are conducting a canned food drive that will be donated to children of Air Force military families who receive food stamps and/or are on public assistance.We believe that we must collect at least 4,000 cans of food or more to fulfill the comparable amount for our restitution.

Please put a can or number of cans of healthy food in a padded envelope or box and send it now.(Important weeks are from Nov. 15 - 29 with Thanksgiving included.(Information below)

Attention:

We have printed a coupon for your use.Put it inside the package with the can(s).Then,please mail it.

Send no money, please!

If you live in the Denver, CO area we are outside the U.S. Attorney's Office Building, 1225 17th St. each work day from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M from November 15 -28th (except week-ends and holidays when public buildings are closed.Come see us, drop off your donation and hear our voices of appreciation.

We hope and pray that this will put to rest our restitution mandate and requirement.

2. The prosecutor rejected the plan unless the Air Force receives our response as victim.

3. The prosecutor knows that we are prohibited from going onto a military site for community service according to our supervised release prohibitions.

4. We sincerely have worked hard to do many services in lieu of restitution and trust this inspired idea to give canned food to the children of Air Force families who are in need will complete the requirement.

Children are the most vulnerable in war under the bombs and in military families as their parent(s) are separated from them.

We thank you in advance for your assistance!Let us continue our work together for disarmament and peace.

It's fun to watch the evolution of noise artists:1. Some, like Sunburned Hand of the Man, offer recordings that one could play at parties without clearing the room. Listen to "The Splintering" or "Blues for Game 2" and see what I mean:

3. Others wander completely over to the other side of formlessness, and come back sounding like 1930s blues recordings. The fact that Pete and Gabe from Yellow Swans and Tom Carter from Charalambides can make such a melodic work as "Mudsuckers" amazes me:

Two of the most holier-than-thou groups took actions today that exemplify the things that make me grumpy. In Farmers Branch, Texas, a town with a majority (legal) Latino population decided to ban illegal immigrants:

I wish some of these folks would read Tamara Jacoby's article in the new Foreign Affairs (hardly a liberal journal), "Immigration Nation," in which she points out vital stats on the critical roles played by both legal and illegal immigrants. Sure, let's have arguments about bracero programs, status of amnesty, border control, but let's not penalize a whole subpopulation! Local Colorado politicians like Tom Tancredo are famous for doing this, but many folks calling themselves liberal are doing it too. When The Nation magazine had a special issue on the immigrant debate, scores of letter-writers castigated The Nation by saying one could be liberal and still love Lou Dobbs. Sorry, Dobbs is a right-wing nutcase. On this subject, even George W. has a more nuanced position than half the Democrats.

The other topic had to do with Marine Reserves rejecting talking-Jesus dolls for Toys for Tots:

What really sets me off here is the comment by Michael LaRoe, business development manager for one2believe and Teddy Bear Corp., that anyone can benefit from Biblical quotations. When the character is Jesus and the sound bytes are New Testament quotes directly from the main man, I question that - and I consider myself Christian. Too many evangelicals assume that the faith-based truths from the New Testament are universal, even for Jews or Muslims. Now, it's one thing to evangelize or prosyletize, but when you do so, use a little humility in assuming that the view you bring to people may not be what they consider truth. Too many Christian evangelical groups cannot define the various layers of "truth" and their relative universality. The Marines made the right call on this one.

OK, many of you are probably familiar with cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon) - has anyone ever tried to dive into his massive trilogy, The Baroque Cycle? I got it a few months ago but hadn't attempted anything until a few weeks ago. Am now in the middle of it, and ye gods, what a mind-slam.

It's surrealist historical fiction from the 1680s, weaving together Louis XIV's imperial wars in Central Europe, the Newton-Liebniz battles over who invented calculus, women's role in Euro-nobility, and swashbuckling piracy among the Barbary Muslims. If it sounds too Yo-Ho, rest assured that the quality of writing here is at the Tom Pynchon-Richard Powers level - writing careens from prose to poetry to screenplay in a hilarious and unpredictable way, but it's as scary-profound as it is silly. As trilogies go, this one can take on the scope and style of Lord of the Rings or the Dos Passos America series.

You can find the trilogy everywhere, as it was on the NY Times bestseller list - the three constituent books are Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. By the way, Richard Powers' new one, The Echo-Maker, is out now, and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day comes out in a week. Won't dive into them until I'm done with Stephenson though.